Top of the radio charts: Jodrell Bank goes for UNESCO World Heritage status

UN, you had better say yes...

Jodrell Bank is going forward for nomination as a World Heritage Site early in 2018.

As featured in Geek’s Guide to Britain, Jodrell Bank is home to the Lovell Telescope, the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world, and "probably the only Grade 1 listed structure that’s on wheel," according to the site.

Reg man goes time travelling at iconic observatory

The telescope detects radio waves that have travelled for millions or even billions of years at the speed of light from distant objects far off across the Universe.

Established in 1945 by Sir Bernard Lovell, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester, the site went on to play a major role in the Cold War's space and arms races, tracking the Russians' first space shots and listening into traffic.

One of its early successes was unlocking the secrets of quasers, and the site continues to be a centre for world-class science research.

Jodrell is also HQ for the €1.5bn Square Kilometre Array project, which will run a network of thousands of radio receptors across Australia and eight countries in southern Africa. When it's running, SKA will generate 960,000,000GB of data a day.

And if that weren't enough, it also acts as a backdrop for the Beeb's Star Gazing.

In a blog post, professor Teresa Anderson said: "We are looking forward, now to January 2018, when the full nomination dossier will be submitted to UNESCO for consideration. And hopefully, around 18 months afterwards, the site will be inscribed on the World Heritage List." ®